


After the Tribulations: the Black Dog

by ljs



Series: Tribulations [3]
Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Established Relationship, F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 06:15:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7032934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ljs/pseuds/ljs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Assume that the story diverged from canon in late Season 3. Assume that the Witnesses, now married, have beaten all seven Tribulations and call Sleepy Hollow home.</p><p>But sometimes past hurts come back. It takes a Witness to heal a Witness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After the Tribulations: the Black Dog

I.  
Most of the time, her Crane is in motion – talking or fidgeting, writing or fighting, touching her or loving her, taking care of her and their daughter in a dance to music only he hears. She expects the flutter of fingers, the movement of his hair and his coat and the things he uses as shields even now. She’s used to them.

But then something happens – some trigger they can’t always predict -- and he goes still.

Tonight, it’s just after darkness has fallen. Gracie is playing with a puzzle in the living room. Abbie looks up from giving her baby girl advice, and sees that Crane isn’t in his usual place on the couch. She thinks back to dinner conversation. Something about war, and… oh. Right. Graves.

“Be right back, baby girl,” she says, and goes out to the front porch. October’s here, and it’s chilly.

Crane leans against the pillar, facing out into the front garden he’s worked hard on, a dark figure against the light. He’s so still that he could be frozen in place.

She thinks of what he told her – years ago, when she pushed, and pushed hard – about his waking up in a cold cave, clawing out of a burial plot made by a crazy-ass witch wife. He had felt, he told her, as if he had been lost underneath the ice and only just broken through. Sometimes in those first couple years of his time with her, he told her, he had felt as if he had drowned there in the dark and was ice yet. 

Through the rest of the Tribulations they’d been mostly too busy to have time for mini-breakdowns. But those days are gone, and somehow in the everyday life they’ve built, there’s more space for the bad memories. Not all the time. Just sometimes.

She goes to him. He’s without his coat – his armor – just her tall, lanky man in a white shirt and trousers and boots. She rubs the small of his back, comforting. He’s warm.

“Hey, babe,” she says, and waits.

“My dear Sheriff,” he says, and she can _feel_ him trying to collect himself, trying to summon nerves and flutter, trying to be easy for her.

“No, Crane. Don’t fight. Just be.” She wraps her arms around his waist, leans her cheek against his back, holds on.

His hands cover hers. There's silence, and then, “It’s just... You recollect what the great Winston Churchill called his moments of melancholia?”

“Can’t say I do,” she murmurs against soft cotton and skin.

“The Black Dog,” he says, and in his sigh she hears old grief. “It’s howling for me tonight, Abbie.”

Her heart swells to hear her name – which he still saves for special occasions. It is a gift that he’s giving her, this openness.

“What will shut that old hound up, my man?” she says. “’Cause I’m going to do it, whatever it is.”

“Warrior-queen, fighting the world’s battles,” he murmurs, and turns in her arms, and kisses her. Then, his gaze holding hers: “I need to let it howl a bit more. Then I’ll come in to you and Gracie. Then I’ll let you help. Because it is _you_ , Abbie, you being you, that makes the bloody dog go quiet for me.”

At his words, she feels so much, so freaking much. It’s not always comfortable, this swell of emotion he and Gracie can inspire in her. It’s goddamn terrifying sometimes, to be honest. She was alone a long, long time.

But now he kisses her again, deeply and sweetly, and she can feel his tremble. She will do whatever he needs.

“Come in soon, babe,” she says softly, and tugs at his stupid ponytail, and then lets go.

“Where’s Daddy?” Gracie says, before Abbie can get more than two steps into the living room. “Is he going to come inside?”

“Soon, Gracie,” Abbie says. Then she bends down. The puzzle’s almost done. “Look at you, smart girl.”

“Almost made it!” Gracie says. “I don’t know what to do with this piece, though.”

Abbie solves puzzles in her job all the time. There’s something so comforting when there’s an answer, a piece, a tangible whatever that puts everything right. Those moments of connection and completion need to be cherished. "Let's work on it," she says.

So she and Gracie play with the last three pieces, moving them around, until Crane comes in, bringing a hint of New York State cold and a suggestion of old smoke. He doesn’t say anything – so rare, her man not running his mouth – but comes and puts one hand on Gracie’s head, one hand on Abbie’s shoulder.

Abbie thinks she hears the last long howl of a faraway dog. Probably just the neighbors’ Husky, but maybe not. 

She turns her head and kisses his wrist. He holds on tighter.  
……………………………..

II.  
Most of the time, his Abbie is in motion. Even when she’s doing her yoga – ridiculous practice, he still thinks – she doesn’t like the slower poses. She rushes through the end so she can get to the next thing. She manages her demanding job, her duties and joys as a mother, her work even now as a Witness, and, well, him, with the skill and grace of a queen.

But then something happens – some trigger they can’t always predict – and she goes still.

This winter night she comes in almost five hours late. He’s had texts from Miss Sophie (he can’t call her Mrs Reynolds; he feels odd calling her Deputy or Lieutenant) that kept him abreast of the missing-person case that had occupied the Sheriff. A young woman hadn’t made it through the park she’d been crossing to get home. The Sheriff’s office had coordinated the search, and Abbie had been at the heart of it.

He has a vision of young Abbie, lost in the woods after Moloch had shown itself to her and Miss Jenny. He has a vision of Abbie, his beloved wife and partner, trapped alone in the underworld for ten months. He has a very good idea that she will be hurting tonight, haunted by old emptiness. There is space in their everyday lives for the return of repressed pain.

When she comes in the door, she’s quiet, sad, all but frozen. He doesn’t have to ask if they found the young woman unharmed. He knows by her face and posture they didn’t.

“Abigail,” he says, as she shrugs off her coat. He rarely calls her by her full second name. 

Tonight she looks up and tries to smile. It is a miserable failure.

“My love,” he says, and comes to her, and gathers her in.

She hugs him so hard, so completely, as if the imprint of his body is necessary to ground her here. It is the embrace they so often shared after separation – Purgatory of their first tribulation, the underworld of her third tribulation, the half-life of the sixth.

“Gracie?” she whispers.

“In bed and asleep an hour ago.” He kisses her then. She’s trembling. “I made chicken noodle soup, and it’s warming on the stove. A glass of something as well, perhaps?”

“Ichabod,” she says, and his proper name is an answer. There’s something so wounded in her voice, something that chicken noodle soup won’t fix.

His hands go to her face, caressing, urging her to look at him. “A Black Dog night, my love?” he whispers. “Tell me what will shut up that old hound for you. Because I will do anything for you. Anything. Whatever you need.” 

Her laugh is a sob. “Crane,” she says, “show me you’re here and real.”

“With the greatest pleasure,” he says, and he lifts her onto the counter, wraps her legs around his waist, and dives in. He kisses her deeper, harder, even as his hips move against her center and his hands come up under her sweater.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” she says, and arches higher, breasts full and ripe in his hands, thighs restless against him. “Make me feel it.”

When her jeans and undergarments are on the floor, when his trousers are open, he drives inside her. She cries out in joy, keeps making those sweet noises as he takes her higher yet, comes much more quickly than he expects, keeps going until he collapses against her with a groan.

They hold each other, there in their warm kitchen, until she says that her legs are cramping, Gracie might wake up and find them, time to get down. They scramble back into their clothes. He prepares her a cup of soup with fresh brown bread on the side, pours a glass of Pinot Noir for her, sits her down at their dining room table. Before he moves away, however, she catches his wrist and kisses him lightly, there on the vein.

“You do know how to shut up an old mean dog, Crane,” she says, and she almost sounds like herself.

“I am yours to command, Abbie. I’m always right here,” he says, and holds on.


End file.
